Café Wha?

Café Wha, the original stomping grounds of the Beat Generation where Allen Ginsburg howled and Dylan sang about the changin’ times is still operating in Greenwich Village, NY. Its name came to mind while I was reading about Starbucks’ newest venture, a coffee house. But not a coffee house in the current mold; these will focus on unique small-batch coffees, community involvement, and live entertainment including music, acting, and poetry readings. Oh, and they will also serve beer and wine late into the night.

Starbucks says they’ve been working on this boutique concept for the past 15 years. In my own kitchen research, the idea of Starbucks as community gathering place has been tested with some frequency of late. I attended several neighborhood-sponsored events at three different Starbucks locations in the last year and while each evening’s agendas may have been lacking, the choice of venue was not. Throughout, the parents were happy to lap at lattes while the kids ate all manner of pastries, cookies, and cakes. I left wondering why Starbucks doesn’t always stay open late, as coffee fixes seem to strike my friends in inverse proportion to the time of day.

My only quibble is with the choice of name for this new venture – “Fifteenth Avenue Coffee and Tea, Inspired by Starbucks”. Wha??? That’s a mouthful. Even shortened to “Inspired by Starbucks”, it’s still too toothy and self-reverential. “Fifteenth Avenue”? Would that resonate with anyone who’s not a Seattle native? “Coffee and Tea”? I thought the idea was to offer something other than that. It is tricky to get the halo effect of a brand umbrella while also distancing yourself just enough to seem new. I’m sure they considered and rejected more names than a first-time parent but surely something that alluded to their strong brand equity would have been better. For this new concept of serving up entertainment with sustenance as food for the body and the soul, I would’ve expected more of a new age-y kind of name. But maybe that’s exactly what “Fifteenth Avenue” is meant to convey – something more local than global; less worldly than homey — a safe haven, a familiar hangout, a place where everybody knows your name.

Scoop

Starting this week, Starbucks and Unilever are offering free pints of ice cream on Facebook. Users who visit http://apps.facebook.com/starbucksicecream can win a coupon redeemable for one of four new flavors. Each hour, 800 pints will be given away with a total of 280,000 pints distributed for the duration of the two week promotion.

I could just see how that pitch meeting went – ice cream + summer + friends = Facebook! The premier social media site lists their users at over 200 million so it’s an unbeatable way to reach a lot of people with little effort. I admire companies that are maximizing social media in this way. It shows that they are not only aware of the importance of it; they are finding ways to utilize it to stay relevant. At the end of last year, Dell reported that they’d already made $1 million in revenue via sales alerts on Twitter. At the time, Twitter was a very new medium of micro-blogging but Dell was prescient in determining its value. Many others have since followed suit but oddly, some marketers are still taking a wait-and-see attitude towards advertising on social media. Some don’t even have a presence on Twitter while others have embraced it and its potential wholeheartedly. Best Buy’s CMO, Barry Judge tweets as BestBuyCMO.

Each new medium had its detractors. Try to imagine the heyday of radio, television, and the internet when skeptics thought each would be a passing fad. People said the same of Facebook but five years after it was created, it boasts users that are equal to 2/3 of the U.S. population. You know what they say about revenge…it’s sweet.